Hello everyone,
Interwiki conflicts are a pain.
Bot operators receive warnings about them, but often do not fix them,
probably because they are reluctant to tamper manually with projects
in languages that they don't know. The result is that groups of
interwiki-linked articles remain unmaintained.
One technical solution that may ease this pain is Nikola Smolenski's
"Interlanguage" extension. The central hub for its discussion is this
page in meta:
*
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interlanguage_link
Being very eager about interlanguage linking, i decided to Be Bold and
opened a MediaZilla request to enable this extension in Wikimedia
projects. It is supposed to be discussed on wikitech-l.
However, this is only a partial solution. Enabling this extension will
make resolving conflicts technically easier, but it still must be done
by a human editor. I am studying linguistics and i have a pretty good
intuition for guessing the content of Wikipedia articles in languages
that i don't know, so i often make thorough fixes in interwiki
conflicts across different Wikipedias. Automatic translation sometimes
helps, too. However, i cannot really know all languages and i cannot
be familiar with all the different policies and cultures of different
projects. Finally, it's way too much work for me to complete all by
myself.
Therefor, a culture of discussing this between Wikipedias needs to
develop somehow. (Other Wikimedia projects can participate in this,
too; i am familiar mostly with Wikipedia.)
In another Being-Bold initiative, i started this page in meta:
*
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization
It's a very preliminary and experimental page. I have many more ideas
about it, but it's a start.
You are already welcome to comment on the case that i opened there,
"Black box"; comments from French speakers are particularly needed.
You are also welcome to add cases of your own. You are welcome to
write a bot that will automate the implementation of the discussion
outcomes. Etc.
I hope that a new era of interwiki links is beginning.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni
heb:
http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng:
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat:
http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus:
http://amire80.livejournal.com
"We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace." - T. Moore